


again, again, again

by pprfaith



Series: Wishlist 2016 [17]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: A Spot on Angst, Alternate Universe, Gen, Gore, Hopeful Ending, Not Beta Read, Prompt Fic, Season/Series 01, Temporary Character Death, Time Travel, Wishlist_Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-23
Updated: 2016-12-23
Packaged: 2018-09-11 09:19:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,790
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8973907
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pprfaith/pseuds/pprfaith
Summary: In which Buffy dies and wakes up in Sunnydale, circe 1996.(Wishlist, Day 17)





	

**Author's Note:**

> For Songbirdie-101, who asked for exactly what the summary says, with bonus Spuffy. I didn't quite get around to the pairing, but the trajectory is pretty clear. :) i hope you enjoy. 
> 
> ... This might be the first 'pure' Buffy story I ever posted on this site. Huh.

+

Buffy’s first thought on waking up is _not again_.

Because she’s died and woken up far too many times already. This time, though, this time, she lay there, coughing blood, alone and cold, thinking – thinking - 

Her second thought is that that ceiling is really, really ugly. 

Her third goes something along the lines of, wait, I know that ceiling, I know that wallpaper, I’m in Sunnydale, Sunnydale is a sinkhole, the house is gone and I tore that wallpaper down in the late nineties. 

“Buffy!” an almost forgotten voice calls from downstairs. “Honey, are you awake? You’ll be late for school! It’s your first day!”

+

So. Time travel. 

+

Being sixteen again is… weird. She’s so young, her face so sweet, her body so weak. Her mother is alive and completely freaked out after Buffy lunges at her and hugs her for a full minute before letting go with a lame excuse. No scars. No _Dawn_. 

If this is her first day, none of the Scoobies know her yet. But they’re also all alive. She has boobs. Cellphones are expensive, Netflix hasn’t been invented yet. She’s all alone in the world, one girl instead of the speartip of an army of thousands. 

She’s… trapped again and freer than she ever has been as the same time and it’s weird, so freaking weird to sit in her mom’s ancient new car and drive through streets that, a few hours ago, only existed in her memory, next to her mother, who was dead for over a decade and is now alive and young and _well_. 

Just like Buffy. 

Apocalypse season, hell raising shenanigans and a random sword through the chest. She was _dead_. It hurt. She gasped for breath, alone as she always is when she dies, gasped and wished so hard, so very hard, that he - 

And now she’s here. Why?

She’s here and everyone’s alive and well and they have no idea what’s going to come, what’s waiting for them. Jenny and Ford and Jesse and Tara and Angel and Oz and Anya and Mom and there were so many that she can’t even remember them all, so many that died because of what Buffy brought into their lives and all of them, all of them are still breathing now. 

All of – 

Oh god. Spike’s alive. 

Spike is – 

She doesn’t even have to fake being sick, just slaps her mother on the arm, hisses something urgent and then practically jumps out the door as soon as the car halts, panting, wheezing. She doesn’t throw up because it’s been years since she had a physical reaction to any of the crap that happens to her, but it’s a close thing. 

Closer than usual.

Right. Teenage body.

He’s alive. Spike is alive, William is alive. The only person who ever looked at her and didn’t see the masks, didn’t see Buffy, or the slayer, sister, warrior, princess, daughter, freak, the _only one_. There was never room for masks between them, from their first meeting on. They were ugly with each other and cruel, sometimes, but always honest and Buffy _died_ thinking – 

He’s alive. 

They are _all_ alive.

She bites back a weak giggle and tries hard not to flinch away as her dead mother presses a hand to her forehead, her expression unbearably kind. “Honey, you’re clammy. I think you’re getting sick.”

She groans, nods pathetically. Lets that be her answer. 

Giles and Xander and Willow and Cordelia are all at that school. She can’t go in there. 

So she lets herself be taken home and stuffed back into her old bed in her old room in her old life, shocky and only half faking it. 

+

Time travel. What even. 

+

Eventually, she manages to send her mom off to work, claiming she can be sick on her own. “Mom, I’m – sixteen.”

She almost says thirty-five but bites her lip at the last moment. How old is her mom right now? Just about the same age, isn’t she?

She grabs the tea and crackers her mother leaves her and crawls into bed to start plotting because she has no idea why she’s here or how she landed here or what she’s supposed to do, but until she does, she’s going to operate on the assumption that she’s stuck here, in an actual past version of her life.

That means she can change things.

She just needs to figure out which things and to what outcome. 

Twenty years of disaster and she can change it all. 

Add a headache to that queasy stomach.

+

Two days later she fakes a miraculous recovery, kisses her mother goodbye and heads to school with a notebook filled with everything that went wrong last time and all the ways to fix it. 

Somewhere in the back of her mind, Andrew’s most pretentious preaching voice informs her that no plan ever survives first contact with the enemy.

She gets the paperwork out of the way within minutes and heads straight for the library with ten minutes to spare before first class.

Giles’ face is so incredibly young, his hair almost free of grey. And when he hears her name, he brightens like a kid in a candy store, so eager, so excited. So very innocent to the reality of being stuck in the field with a girl born to die.

And just like last time, he bends to pull one of his demonology books out from beneath the counter. Only this time Buffy is faster and before he can smack it down in front of her, she slaps her notebook against his chest and tells him, “I brought you some light reading, watcher mine. I’ll be back for lunch. Bye!”

And she blows out of there, leaving him with every single thing she remembers of her high school years and beyond, because it’s easier than having to look at him when he realizes the truth. 

She’ll be back by lunch. He should have gotten over the worst of the shock by then. If he even believes her, that is. But then, Olivia, Ethan, demon summoning cults, it’s all in there. 

It’s _Giles_. He’ll believe her. 

He has to.

+

She sees them, in the hallways, in the quad, and it’s surprisingly easy to turn the other way, to not look. She’s saving their lives. It’s the easiest thing she’s done since she took Spike’s hand and prepared to let them both burn. 

+

He does.

He does, thank all the gods above and below, living and dead, Giles believes her. 

And because he’s always and forever the best man she’s ever had in her life, he rushes around the counter when she reenters the library for lunch, as promised, and pulls her into the best hug he’s ever given her. 

“I am so sorry, dear girl. So sorry.”

She buries her nose in his neck, smells tweed and tea and English dude, and says, very meekly, “I was afraid you’d have me committed.”

He hesitates before pulling back, starts polishing his glasses immediately. “To be honest, I was. But the more I read… there is no making up some of those details. Your knowledge, the enemies you’ve faced, you couldn’t possibly know -,” in the end he just smiles at her.

And like a baby, Buffy smiles back. He believes her. It’s a better start than she could have hoped for. “What now?”

He shrugs. “While you are my slayer and I your watcher, without a doubt and until one of us dies, this situation is certainly extraordinary. As such, I think we might do away with the usual dynamics.”

“Meaning,” Buffy translates, a fond grin spreading on her face, “that you’re willing to follow my lead.”

He sniffs and god, early days Giles is so very stuffy. “I do believe that is what I said.”

“Sure. Totally.” She adds a thumbs up for emphasis. 

He doesn’t know her well enough yet to roll his eyes at her, but that’s okay. They’ll get there. 

+

Darla never gets her claws into Jesse, this time around. Buffy makes sure of that. Without this Harvest business, there is no need for more footsoldiers. No need to turn sixteen-year-old boys into monsters. 

That means Willow and Xander never get drawn into it. Instead, the three of them go for late night ice-cream and watch crappy scifi movies all night long because the Bronze is unexpectedly closed. 

+

“What about your friends?” he asks three days later, over cafeteria lunch smuggled into the library. He scowled, frowned and then stole her chocolate pudding. It’s kind of fun, being on more equal footing with him. She looks sixteen, but she’s barely a decade younger than him, here, now, and he knows it. Understands it. This Giles never interacted on a student-teacher level with her, so there are no habits to break.

“What about them?” she counters, munching on a tepid fry. 

“Are you intending to tell them about the supernatural?”

“Nope,” she answers, kicking her legs up on the nearest chair. 

“Why not?”

“Because they’re kids and it ruined their lives.”

He taps her notebook. “It seems to me they also helped you a lot and were valuable allies.”

“Kids.”

The slayer is a child soldier and always has been, but there is no need for Willow, Xander and all of the others to give up their childhoods and their futures again. Anya maybe, if she ever shows up. Oz and his cousin, if they end up turning again. The ones that have no choice. But every person she can keep away from this life is a victory.

“Shouldn’t the choice be theirs?” He looks at her intently and she honestly can’t tell if he’s being serious or playing the devil’s advocate. But – 

“By giving them the option I already take away their choice. Because they’ll be too curious to say no, and once they know, they’ll feel obligated to do something.” Because despite all the problems they had with each other over the years, the Scoobies have always been good people. They could never just walk away. 

Giles hums in thought. “If it becomes necessary to include them – “

“We can talk again. Until then, I’m the slayer and for now, slayer means alone.” She grimaces at the memory, ignores his questioning eyebrow and steals back her pudding. 

+

After a week of familiarizing herself with her teenage body, Buffy puts on a pair of jeans and a jacket she won’t miss and treks into the sewers, armed with a handful of stakes, a crossbow and two decades of war under her belt. 

Ol’ Punchmouth has never met anything like her before.

And he never will again, because she grinds his bones into dust and scatters them in the grimy sewer water. One big bad down. 

+

“Does that mean the prophecy is moot?” Giles asks, idly, when she tells him about her adventure with Batface the Not so Terrible.

She shrugs. “Maybe. Or maybe the fact that I replaced my sixteen-year-old self somehow counts as a death, of sorts? Who cares. We lived, the bad guys died, everything is puppies and sunshine.” She squints at him. “You know, Other Giles always gave me a cookie when I killed something.”

There’s the eyeroll.

+

Willow and Xander are living their lives as they ever have, Joyce is oblivious and, hopefully, will stay that way this time. 

The lying is a small price to pay compared to the way she kept breaking her mother’s heart, time after time, once the truth was out. Maybe she’ll get her GED, move away for ‘college’. Call and write and visit and keep her mother safe.

Alive, too. Regular check-ups from now on, even if she has to blackmail the older woman into them. Maybe it’ll be enough. Maybe it’ll save her. 

Giles is on her side.

That leaves only one loose end at the moment, one that she’s been avoiding for weeks now, ducking into alleys and leaping up buildings to get away from him. 

Angel. Seventy percent of her hang-ups over men, relationships and life in general all wrapped up in one neat, forehead heavy package. 

She smiles at her own Spike-ism and sighs as he finally manages to corner her. 

“Slayer,” he greets, head ducked, looking at her from under his lashes, shoulders hunched like a beaten dog and how did she ever find that attractive? He screams emotionally unstable masochist loud enough to deafen her. 

“Vampire,” she returns, because why not.

He hesitates, visibly startled at her calm greeting. 

“You know what I am?”

“I know who you are, too. Word of advice, the soul? Not anchored. One moment of pure bliss and it’s gone. Gypsies do like their loopholes and twists of the knife, huh?”

“How do you-“

“Look,” she rolls over him. “You want to help out with the pest control around here, be my guest. But I don’t – just stay away from me, okay?”

Smooth, Buffy, really smooth. But, but, but. There’s too much history there, too much heartbreak. If she lets him stay close she’ll need to explain everything to him and she _knows_ that he’ll take it as a sign that they’re fated and try to win her back, or something. 

And she can’t do that. It took her years and years to get over Angel and she’s not getting back into it with him. Not now that he doesn’t even remember the long, hard road it took to get them on something like even ground. They were almost friends at the end. It almost didn’t hurt anymore. She almost forgave him for killing Spike a second time.

And then Buffy died and here she is again and this Angel is the Angel who didn’t tell her he was a vamp for months, who leapt out of her window and then tried to commit ritual suicide via sire, who tried to murder her and all her friends and then walked away for her own good, stole those few days of happiness from her like he had the right and generally sucked at treating her like a woman instead of spun glass. 

Well, except for when he was trying to gruesomely murder her, but. Well. Their entire relationship can be summed up under ‘woe is me’ and Buffy remembers hating how Giles used to call her stupid and childish for swooning over Angel, but boy, was he right. 

He opens his mouth to say something, anything, but she just hefts her stake and he can’t possibly know that she never would, so he nods. Nods and retreats. 

+

In the next month, the mayor dies under mysterious circumstances and an underground explosion rocks the northern part of town, close to campus. 

Giles purses his lips but says nothing, lets her be. She’s the oldest slayer who ever lived and there isn’t a single line on her face to prove it. He can’t stop her and she loves him for not trying. 

Various demon cults disappear or become mincemeat. Willy’s bar is shut down, its proprietor having a sudden change of heart concerning his career plans. 

Buffy is out and about six nights out of seven, diligently working her way through town, rather than just the cemeteries. She keeps her grades average by virtue of knowing many of the things taught in class already. French, English, history, those things have sunk in over decades of actual, real-world living. Math and chem remain a mystery, but she has more time to devote to them now, instead of breaking her limited study time down between half a dozen subjects. 

Occasionally, Giles helps. 

She might actually get away without the Disappointed Mom Glare TM this time. 

On the seventh night a week, Angel takes over patrol and Buffy has dinner with her mother, spinning tales about friends she doesn’t have and parties she didn’t go to. If her mother notices the change in her daughter, she never comments, just accepts the family nights, the hugs and the smiles freely and lets her only child be. 

It’s nice. 

It still feels like waiting. 

+

“Have you ever considered why you are here?”

Buffy sighs, blowing a strand of sweaty hair out of her face and taking a short break from beating her watcher into a pulp. 

“Because you make me train despite the fact that you end up black and blue every time?” she chirps. Sometimes slipping back into teenage Buffy’s chipper flippancy is way too easy. 

He frowns and tries to hide the fact that it hurts him to lower his arms. “I meant in the past, Buffy.”

She shrugs. “Well, it’s not heaven, it’s not hell, it’s not some kind of con, because it’s been too long, and the world hasn’t started disintegrating, yet, so it’s probably not a world-ending paradox thing either. I’m here, I’m alive, I can fix a few things. Good enough for me.”

She goes to grab some water for both of them, passes him his bottle without meeting his gaze. 

“Yes, but _why_? What sent you here? Why you? Why now? What are you meant to do? Who has the power to do this? A witch, some higher entity?”

She sips. “Does it matter?”

“Of course it does. What if there are consequences we cannot foresee, yet? What if we have to send you back – “

“You can’t,” she reminds him. “I’m dead. You send me back, you kill me. Besides, how would you do that?”

“But the uncertainty-“

“Is something everyone deals with every day. I knew a future. I changed just about everything about it, so now it’s a completely new one and guess what, no-one knows the future.”

“Then how do you know you didn’t make things worse? How do you know you weren’t sent here by some malevolent entity with the intention of using you for its nefarious plans?”

Buffy opens her mouth, closes it, covers it by sipping some more water and fiddling with the wrapping on her knuckles. She died. She died for the third time and she did it thinking – she was thinking – 

“If it is, we’ll just deal. We always do. I know you don’t know this yet, but we’re pretty badass, Giles. It’ll be alright.”

She fakes a dinner date with her mother to get away early. 

+

Buffy died and she died thinking, died _wishing_ , even though never out loud, and she thinks, that just this once, just once – 

But that’s ridiculous. 

+

She can feel his eyes on her from the moment he sets foot inside the Bronze, can feel him zero in on her like a homing beacon, the way he undresses her down to her soul and _sees_.

This time, she doesn’t wait for him to set up the ruse with the vamp in the alley. 

This time, she meets his cool gaze between the throng of dancers and smiles at him before turning on her heel and walking out. 

Knowing that he’ll follow, because he always, always has. 

And he does.

“Two things,” Buffy starts, as soon as he sets foot into the alley behind the club, before he has even time to strike a pose. His hands stop halfway to his pockets and the cigarettes inside. He raises one eyebrow.

She forgot the way he does that, hiking up the scarred brow, lips pursed, cocky as all get out. Alive. The duster and the clunky boots and the swagger, the confidence. The color of his eyes. She thought she remembered every detail, ever minute fact, but she forgot so much.

Refusing to let herself fall into it, she hurries to continue.

“One,” she ticks off, holding up a finger. “Please stay away from the school? Parent teacher night is enough of a screw-fest without you randomly murdering people. Two,” another finger, “the ritual to restore Drusilla only calls for sire’s blood, not sire’s death, so don’t kill Angel. He’s pretty useful when he’s not moping and Dru would never forgive you for ganking her daddy.” She grimaces at just saying the words, but Angel has a job to do in this world and eventually, the souled version takes in Drusilla, finally doing penance for what he did to her. 

The last time Buffy was in LA, the nutty vampire actually managed to hold an entire conversation without her doll to help her along. 

The expression on his face is shock, but it’s not the hurt, broken kind of shock she remembers on his face from before. No, this is the shock of his early run-ins with her mother, of the time she threw an organ on him. Free of fear. Just surprise.

This Spike, for all that he’s over a century old, is terribly young. Terribly young and _whole_. 

Finally, he wipes his face clean of emotion, squares his shoulders. “Slayer-“

“Buffy,” she tells him. 

“What the-“

“My name is Buffy. Use it.”

“I’m not here to make sodding conversation, slayer!”

She smiles at him and she knows it’s too familiar, can feel the softness of it, but she can’t stop it, can’t help looking at him with every bit of fondness she feels. 

“Not yet,” she tells him, because she knows he won’t be able to resist her now. He’s too curious. Too hungry. 

He’ll come to her. 

And she’ll be waiting. 

“I’ll see you on Saturday,” she says, throwing him a wave as she turns, ripping herself away from the sight of him.

“What happens Saturday?” he demands, stuck between cranky and confused.

She stops walking and turns back to him, considering. His fists are balled at his sides, his jaw set tight, his shoulders tense. Confusion has always turned to anger with him, and anger into fight. 

She licks her lips and then, very carefully, she tells him, “Something… effulgent.”

She gives herself a half second to take in his widening eyes, his dropping jaw, and then she turns on her heel and _runs_.

As her feet beat the pavement, she stops trying to bite back the wide smile. He’s alive. He’s alive, he’s alive. 

It’s a beat that carries her all the way home. 

+

She died. 

She died from a sword through her heart, alone, as always, because yet another lover betrayed her, sold her out and left her to die. 

And she lay there, gasping for breath, thinking of Angel trying to kill her, Riley lying, Ford using her, the Immortal making a toy of her, and she couldn’t help but think of Spike.

The only man who never betrayed her. The only lover who never broke her trust. Not before she broke his.

As the world turned black, she couldn’t help but wish, silently, that wherever she was going this time, he’d be there. 

And he is. 

Buffy plans to make it count. 

+

**Author's Note:**

> Come tumble with me [here](http://www.wordsformurder.tumblr.com/).


End file.
